KUWAIT CITY, Jan 29, (Agencies): Kuwait is among countries at high risk of corruption in their defense sectors, according to the report released Tuesday by Transparency International UK — an anti-corruption watchdog.

Besides Kuwait, other countries under the high-risk category include India, Israel, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates (UAE); while China and Russia, which are leading arm exporters like Israel, are at higher risk.

On the other hand, other GCC countries, such as Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have been categorized as being at ‘very high risk’.

Germany and Australia are the only countries out of 82 surveyed by Transparency International UK with strong anti-corruption mechanisms, according to what the watchdog says is the first index measuring how governments counter corruption in defence.

Fifty-seven of the countries, almost 70 percent, had poor controls against corruption, according to the survey, which rated governments by criteria such as the strength of parliamentary oversight of defence policy and the standards expected of defence firms.

The 82 countries surveyed account for 94 per cent of global military expenditure in 2011, worth $1.6 trillion, while the global cost of corruption in the defence sector is estimated to be at least $20 billion a year, the watchdog said.

Mark Pyman, director of Transparency International UK’s Defence and Security Programme, said he hoped the survey would lead governments to improve anti-corruption policies.

Corruption was dangerous, because troops “may well have equipment that doesn’t work”, and it was wasteful, he said.

“Particularly at times of austerity, the idea that it is somehow acceptable that there should be corruption in defence because it has always been so is just an outrageous suggestion,” he told Reuters.

Countries with poor anti-corruption controls included two-thirds of the largest arms importers assessed in the survey and half of the biggest arms exporters, Transparency International said.

Countries classed as being at “very high risk” of corruption include Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka. The United States, Britain, Sweden and South Korea were among countries judged to be at low risk, while France, Spain, Italy and Poland were in the moderate-risk group.

The survey looked not only at the potential for corruption in defence contracts, but also at the risk of abuse of defence budgets and the risk of corruption in the armed forces.

Governments surveyed were given the chance to review Transparency International’s findings.

Pyman said a “shocking” result of the survey was that in half of the countries surveyed, the defence budget was either not public or it contained no breakdown of defence spending.

Only 12 percent of countries surveyed had “highly effective” parliamentary scrutiny of defence policy and only a handful protected whistleblowers who reported defence corruption.

Europe has been swept by a wave of high-profile cases of alleged corruption in defence deals in recent years.

Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa has been charged with bribery over a now-abandoned 2006 deal to buy armoured vehicles. He has denied wrongdoing.

European aerospace and defence group EADS, facing investigations in Austria, Britain and Germany, has launched an external review of its anti-corruption rules.